Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Let's Remake The World


Let's remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
Let's,
As Wordsworth said, remove
"The dust of custom" so things
Shine again, each object arrayed
In its robe of original light.

And then we'll see the world
As if for the first time.
As once we gazed at the beloved
Who was gazing at us.

- Gregory Orr

[Larry Robinson]

Waste

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

- Kay Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

If, On Account Of The Political Situation


If, on account of the political situation,

there are quite a number of homes without roofs, and
men

Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor
asleep,

If all sailings have been cancelled till further
notice,

If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,

Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,

The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,

That is not at all unusual for this time of year.

If that were all, we should know how to manage.
Flood, fire,

The dessication of grasslands, restraint of princes,

Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal
grief,

These are after all our familiar tribulations,

And we have been through them all before, many, many
times.

As events which belong to the natural world where

The occupation of space is the real and final fact

And time turns round itself in an obedient circle,

They occur again and again but only to pass

Again and again into their formal opposites,

From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to
work,

So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern
composed

By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly
happen

Is permanent in a general average way.



Till lately we knew of no other, and between us we
seemed

To have what it took -- the adrenal courage of the
tiger,

The chameleon's discretion, the modesty of the doe,

Or the fern's devotion to spatial necessity:

To practice one's peculiar civic virtue was not

So impossible after all; to cut our losses

And bury our dead was really quite easy. That was why

We were always able to say: "We are children of God,

And our Father has never forsaken His people."

But then we were children: That was a moment ago,

Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced

Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we
were.

Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain

We noticed on certain occasions -- sitting alone

In the waiting room of the country junction, looking

Up at the toilet window -- was not indigestion

But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way
in?

Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:

We can only say that now It is there and that nothing

We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest
use,

For nothing like It has happened before. It's as if

We had left our house for five minutes to mail a
letter,

And during that time the living room had changed
places

With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace;

It's as if, waking up with a start, we discovered

Ourselves stretched out flat on the floor, watching
our shadow

Sleepily stretching itself at the window. I mean

That the world of space where events reoccur is still
there,

Only now it's no longer real; the real one is nowhere

Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen:

I mean that although there's a person we know all
about

Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,

That person has become a fiction; our true existence

Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.



That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome

The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even

The violent howling of winter and war has become

Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are
afraid

Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare

Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.

This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

- W.H. Auden

[Larry Robinson]

We are pleased to announce the third place winner in our Poems For Haiti contest, George Taylor's "Remembering Haiti". Tomorrow we will share the second place winner and on Wednesday the first place. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to all of you who submitted such beautiful gifts!



Remembering Haiti

I see their dark Haitian faces
in the halls at my mother's retirement home.
The men carry tape measures on plaster-stained leather belts.

Jean Phillipe holds a screw driver
in my mother's kitchen.
He says in a Caribbean-French accent
"Your mother is my teacher."

The his smile reaches out to me
across three hundred years of history
which neither of us mentions,
across the rift in the earth
which brought down Haiti's buildings
and across the screams of parents.

This broad white-toothed smile hovers thankfully
above the men and women unloading truckloads of food.

"She helps my English, very bad" Jean Phillipe says.

He smiles again
across the landscape between Haiti and Mill Valley
full of people who help each other
any way they can.

- George Taylor

[Larry Robinson]

Today we offer you the second place winner in our Poems For Haiti Contest.

In Memoriam

for Haiti

One minute heating up the stove
to cook a little lunch
then sweep the floor
the next a rumble
as if trains stampeded through rooms
through walls toppling like lincoln logs
she had given birth
the papers said
on a bed with blue sheets
her baby's face
no longer hers
but the thousands pinned beneath stone
singing could not break through
where they stood swaying
the jut of a hip or dusty feet under skirts
the sky buried itself
no time for
a lullaby, not even a kiss
on the mother's half-opened lips.

- Claire Drucker

[Larry Robinson]

Today we are pleased to share the first place winner in our Poetry For Haiti contest, Laurie Kirkpatrick's "Retrospect".

Retrospect

These photos have been altered
since New Year's week
when my daughter brought them home from Port-au-Prince.

Grey bungalows with fuchsia porches float over the treetops,
opening into air.

Stacked high under plastic tarps and Digicel umbrellas,
ripe guavas. Roosters wave their handful of orange feathers
and insolent blue tails. A wedding flickers in a church
of paper lanterns, baby's breath.

Hibiscus winds through barbed wire.
Archways are latticed in iron filigree.
The least windows are barred as if
the enemy can be shut out.

Before a door the turquoise color of portable latrines
a man carries a bag of soil, or maybe it's cement, on his head;
a woman balances a whole week's groceries in her hamper,
their strong arms and backs about to
shoulder the dead.

- Laurie Kirkpatrick

[Larry Robinson]

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, one end square,
Set there immovable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

- Seamus Heaney

[Larry Robinson]

The Unknown Citizen

(To js/07/m/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

- W.H. Auden

[Larry Robinson]

Invictus


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

[Larry Robinson]

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great

Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains.

Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays
Are stained by syllables of thunder
And Woden's frenzy.

O my fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—
May they pass over us, the old

Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments. Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted
Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter

Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts
In sweet wine to embody mortar
Of affliction, babies for bricks.

Legible traces of the species
That devises the angel of death
Sailing over our doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

A Story

Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.
We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms
with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death,
unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen
must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one
with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling
to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.
This was the center of whatever family life
was here, this and the sink gone yellow
around the drain where the water, dirty or pure,
ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point
of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.
Make no mistake, a family was here. You see
the path worn into the linoleum where the wood,
gray and certainly pine, shows through.
Father stood there in the middle of his life
to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof
must surely be listening. When no one answered
you can see where his heel came down again
and again, even though he'd been taught
never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;
they had well water they pumped at first,
a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood
at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly
to where the woods once held the voices
of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs
of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered
one tree at a time after the workmen arrived
with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill
is where Mother rested her head when no one saw,
those two stained ridges were handholds
she relied on; they never let her down.
Where is she now? You think you have a right
to know everything? The children tiny enough
to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms
of their own and to abandon them, the father
with his right hand raised against the sky?
If those questions are too personal, then tell us,
where are the woods? They had to have been
because the continent was clothed in trees.
We all read that in school and knew it to be true.
Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

- Philip Levine

[Larry Robinson]

Ecclesiastes II:I

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River's flooded shore,

Helps us believe
That it's no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

blessing the boats


(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Planting a Sequoia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-
An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's
orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can-our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

- Dana Gioia

[Larry Robinson]

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollow and thin:
Here is the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Staring into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away.

- Thomas Hardy

[Larry Robinson]

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Rock Bottom

So this is what it comes down to in the end: earth and sand
skimmed, trimmed, filleted from rocky bone, leaving only
solid unshakeable bottom, what doesn't in the end give in
to the relentless hammer, whoosh, and haul-away of tides
but stands there saying "Here I am here I stay," protestant
to the pin of its absolute collar, refusing to put off the sheen
on its clean-scoured surface, no mourning weeds in spite of loss
after loss – whole wedges of the continent, particles of the main
plummeting from one element to the other and no going back
to how things were once, but to go on ending and ending here.

- Eamon Grennan

[Larry Robinson]

Alba

Climbing in the mist I came to a terrace wall
and saw above it a small field of broad beans in flower
their white fragrance was flowing through the first light
of morning there a little way up the mountain
where I had made my way through the olive groves
and under the blossoming boughs of the almonds
above the old hut of the charcoal burner
where suddenly the sent of the bean flowers found me
and as I took the next step I heard
the creak of the harness and the mule’s shod hooves
striking stones in the furrow and then the low voice
of the man talking softly praising the mule
as he walked behind through the cloud in his white shirt
along the row and between his own words
he was singing under his breath a few phrases
at a time of the same song singing it
to his mule it seemed as I listened
watching their breaths and not understanding a word.

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

White Horse


Through the woods of Annadel,

past trees gently arched,

trunks and stones moss-matted —

comes the fair stallion steady on the trail



One angel on a treetop sings

one note, repeated,

repeated



Milky surface of stream,

little wall of water

falling into it,

and the white horse

coming nearer

with a steady sound

beating under the boughs

in the darkness of woods

as if by magic

moving towards

to where, upon the ribbed edge,

he passes

trails a veil of light

that shakes us

as though wind

as though ecstasy



— Katherine Hastings

[Larry Robinson]

Advice from a Tree


Dear Friend

Stand Tall and Proud
Sink your roots deeply into the Earth
Reflect the light of your true nature
Think long term
Go out on a limb
Remember your place among all living beings
Embrace with joy the changing seasons
For each yields its own abundance
The Energy and Birth of Spring
The Growth and Contentment of Summer
The Wisdom to let go like leaves in the Fall
The Rest and Quiet renewal of Winter
Feel the wind and the sun
And the delight in their presence
Look up at the moon that shines down upon you
And the mystery of the stars at night
Seek nourishment from the good things in life
Simple pleasures
Earth, fresh air, light
Be content with your natural beauty
Drink plenty of water
Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes
Be flexible
Remember your roots
Enjoy the view!

- Ivan Shamir

[Larry Robinson]

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Hatred


See how efficient it still is,

how it keeps itself in shape -

our century's hatred.

How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.

How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings.

At once both older and younger.

It gives birth itself to the reasons

that give it life.

When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.

And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.


One religion or another -

whatever gets it ready, in position.

One fatherland or another -

whatever helps it get a running start.

Justice also works well at the outset

until hate gets its own momentum going.

Hatred. Hatred.

Its face twisted in a grimace

of erotic ecstasy.

Oh these other feelings,

listless weaklings.

Since when does brotherhood

draw crowds?

Has compassion

ever finished first?

Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?

Only hatred has just what it takes.

Gifted, diligent, hard working.

Need we mention all the songs it has composed?

All the pages it has added to our history books?

All the human carpets it has spread

over countless city squares and football fields?

Let's face it:

it knows how to make beauty.

The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.

Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.

You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins

and a certain bawdy humor to be found

in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.

Hatred is a master of contrast -

between explosion and dead quiet,

red blood and white snow.

Above all, it never tires

of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner

towering over its soiled victim.

It's always ready for new challenges.

If it has to wait awhile, it will.

They say it's blind. Blind?

It has a sniper's keen sight

and gazes unflinchingly at the future

as only it can.

- Wislawa Szymborska

[Larry Robinson]

I strain my ears
I raise my head
and wait for the dawn breeze
How many times dreamily
herding an ox in the Spring rain?
Who realizes that this intention pierces heaven?
Just remain with rising eyebrows
And blinking eyes

- Dogen Zenji

[Larry Robinson]

Gratitude Goulash

Take down your biggest pot,
bigger than you think you need.
Slice, dice or cut into manageable pieces
the desiccated remains
of all your life's
calamitous events.

Look around for missed ingredients.
Add clean water, local honey and vinegar.
Bring this mess to a rolling boil then
simmer on a back burner for several days.

When your kitchen smells good,
Ask a close friend to come over.
Get out two old bowls,
they need not match.
Just before serving add a dollop of success
and a smidgen of failure.
Then be very liberal with paprika.

Solemnly bless the goulash,
and take a few bites…
Laugh together, forgive yourself,
then gratefully
go out to eat.

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

Farewell Song

There is a new bird in this forest - song so sweet it breaks my heart to be
leaving. Twenty-seven years of the Stellar Jay's harsh voice drowning out
the songbirds. And now, melodious song rings all around, a solitary
woodpecker accompanying on percussion. Yesterday I recorded them with a plan
to reveal their identities. But for now, the trees sing with this mystery of
sweetness - my farewell song.

What then, if I let the world break my heart with it's terrible beauty and
unceasing change?

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Signals and Leaves

The signals we give—yes, or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford

If we listen to the lesson of the falling leaves
we will send the right signals to each other,
the yes, the no, the maybe. We will send
love
and faith
and the knowledge that letting go
is the only way of knowing whether our signals
(of grace, of god)
are coming through
true.
- Fran Claggett

After reading “Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford
and “The Lesson of the Falling Leaves” by Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Parade

Across the valley
carried by the fullness of the spring sun
echo something distant and
familiar: drums. The high
school band prepares again
in the heat of early morning
for the annual parade in our town,
small enough that anyone who
wants can join in,
whose neighbors, children, friends,
animals, enemies, rivals, and anonymous
relatives will march, all steady, then
pause to wait for those ahead
to perform before the judging stand and
then march on, and on, and on

out to the edge of town, out off the far end, marching still
to where they
will echo
and someday start, I know,
for I can feel it already,
a single tear
to salt my closed
and grateful eye.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

To A Young Poet

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to deal with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
Who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotion’s health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am thou, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

- Mahmoud Darwish
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

[Larry Robinson]

The Morning After

I’m contemplating how the snake knows
it’s time to shed her skin. Imagining the internal
clock of now that wakes her, or, simply,
winter over, spine expanding
exponentially when she stretches,
straightens from the eternal coil
of sleeping and waking. Maybe
it’s the startle of a boy stepping near
above the rock she’s chosen
to wait for summer heat.
One day, like a tossed glove, like
a dress which no longer contains the shape
of her seduction, skin breaks.
The slow pull of self comes
like Nature always taught. The robes
of distinction, of wife, mother, lover,
sinner, are all behind her.
The boy whose eye is keen
will find the remnant, take it home,
tack it above his bed.
He’ll admire the length and depth,
will dream the dream of her
the knowledge of her existence
full in his head, the way to sun baked
rock, winding, but clear.

- Cindy Dubielak Yeager

[Larry Robinson]

Harvest of Thorns



Whom are they arresting?

Today, for the bomb in Times Square,

the one that did not go off,

except in people’s hearts

and exploded faith - after calling us back

from the borders of daily care

to stand and watch in horror.

Whom did they arrest?

Not the insatiable hatred, not

this misplaced

passion, obsessed with righting

wrongs at the expense of all

that is

right.

Not the shadow of revenge,

which knows no solace,

runs from loving

caresses, spits out the cloying taste

of reconciliation.

No, they never arrest the right one:

that shadow fleeing

over there, just now

disappearing down the subway,

rounding that corner, the one who

has never yet been caught

in all these millennia

of wars, murderous martyrs,

and lunacy.

Each springs boxes him in,

every butterfly is a bomber,

fixing him in her sights,

every child’s smile a vicious

attack; only a cemetery feels

like home to him.



Such a strange universe, calling for help,

holding so close to its heart

this harvest of thorns.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

To A Terrorist

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefullness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

- Stephen Dunn

[Larry Robinson]

Family Garden

Tell me again about your garden
Tell me how you planted, in the small
flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
but the fenced garden opened freely
to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
You gave away honey from the white hive too,
that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
summer evenings from a chair on the porch
tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

- Hank Hudepohl

[Larry Robinson]

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.



- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Another Mother's Day poem:


We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

[Larry Robinson]

Whales Weep Not!*

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
- D.H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

Wired


First She had to heave up mountains,
then cool her blood with ice and wait
a little while for rock to tumble
shatter, allow her glacier plow
to rake the valleys out, until
the last few seconds, so they say,
we came and settled, built dry walls
up to the crags, scattered sheep to eat
forest shoots, and so came pasture.

And still her brooks course through
her veins, lilting and sighing and
spinning their ways into lake and sea
as she tilts quietly
ominous, egg-timer wired
to our words, feelings, thoughts—
weighing whether to flip it over
or, like the show with too small
an audience, simply close the stage.

- Raphael Block

[Larry Robinson]

It’s The Dream

It’s the dream we carry
that someting wondrous will happen,
that it must happen -
time will open
mountains will open
spring will gush forth from the ground -
that the dream itself will open
that one morning we’ll quietly drift
into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

- Olav H. Hauge
(translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hadin)

[Larry Robinson]

Jump Rope Rhyme

Tat tvam asi:
thou art that -
that leaf, that tree,
that cow, that cat,
that cloud, that sky,
that moon, that sun,
that you, that I -
for all are one.
So here you are
and there you go
and who you were
you hardly know.

I think this I
is only me:
a drip, a drop,
but not the sea.
Yet when I wake
from all these dreams,

then, like the snake,
I'll shed what seems:
this mask, this skin,
this ball and chain.
I will begin
to fall like rain.

Our heart's last home:
the wind-whipped foam,
the sweet, deep sea.
Tat tvam asi.

- Tom Hansen

[Larry Robinson]

Bird of Paradise

I know time flies
because the days have wings
They wake up and fly
with or without me

I know the days have wings
because my heart beats
It beats the way wings beat
between two shores

I know time has shores
because my heart has wings
And wings are made
to reach the other shore

- Clark Heinrich

[Larry Robinson]

Elephant Girl



Elephant Girl just wanted to play; no;

She wanted good work without undue stress;

Feed the elephants without accidents;

If there's an accident, call the Veterinarian;

If not, then practice principles of elephant health.

Stay in the game no matter what.

Which game?

She had a desire to go deeper,

Merge with whatever it is

That makes monks so cheerful

With so very little stuff.

- Connie Madden

[Larry Robinson]

The Absence That Was The Tree

Two men are cutting the dead maple down:
limbs and branches first, then the trunk
in sections, all the pieces scattered in piles
on the ground out of which it grew.

It's been released from its enormous weight.
It's given us this gift of a new view--
now the church and the woods
across the road can stare back at us

through where it stood and labored
to guard our privacy. The regions
of the sky the branches divided have merged
back again into their undefined whole.

All the nests have come crashing down.
No longer will we hear bird song
from the particular quarter: it will not
serve as orientation or point of discussion.

We remark about the extra light,
the new distance its absence
will afford, the extra breezes
traveling through the opened gate.

Death has a way of allowing us to see
beyond where the body formerly stood.
But we have come to love that body
more than the space revealed behind it.

All winter long we'll hack the remnants
even smaller so they will fit our stove,
where the tree will warm us in its next life. When
it says farewell, it will be as smoke on the air.


- Philip Terman

[Larry Robinson]

Before Summer Rain


Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

Sparrow

With its swift
flick and plummet
through the chrism
of these first hours
after the rain
spraying droplets
off its wingtips then
scissoring past
the phone lines
into the blue
distance of roofs
and freeways
how not see it as
diving past
all we slather
onto the world
diving past it
the same way
we survive
our happiness
and also: sorrow.

- Peter Campion

[Larry Robinson]

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

A Hardware Store As Proof of the Existence of God

I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.

In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.

In the right hands, they can work wonders.

- Nancy Willard

[Larry Robinson]

The Loneliest Job in the World
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

-Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

Ancestors



It was only possible to dismiss them —

Yorkshire yeomen and women

Of London who managed

To meet and marry

And not be thrown into prison

Nor deported -- Cockneys

Of a semi-certain legitimacy

In the hurly of survival there.



The docks of time

Spread an ocean between them

And where I sit, never to be old,

Though I live to a hundred and four

As some of them did.



“Do you understand the strategy of the next pitch?

What the batter’s talent is,

Which out’s left,

Who’s next up?”



The focus of all of that, here, now,

Eliminates the past with

Tension on the future,

And Pee Wee Reese and Oscar Wilde

Are one in oblivion with who’s to come.



I have no ancestors.

And as for descendants,

I have nothing to offer the future

Which they cannot supply themselves.

This writing flows black ink only

Onto the lined paper of my heart.



- Bruce Moody

[Larry Robinson]

I know the truth - give up all other truths!

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

- Marina Tsvetayeva

[Larry Robinson]

Inscription for the Door



I have no enemies left,

only some friends who are late.

Come in, hang your coat

beside the fire and pull a chair to its edge.

We shall drink tea and clear the path

leading back to the heart’s first address.

You may have news of these nations beginning

at last to revolve beside each other like seasons

or word of the fires out of control south of us,

where the poor are burning the lies keeping

them poor.

Why are those three ragged strangers still kneeling

Over their ashes, invite them, bring them in,

they can rest here beside this oven of bread.

Children sleep in the corners, taking notes.

A woman is dressing in the room overhead,

her footsteps are tablets I open to sleep.

The new wind is full of branches tonight,

Leaving no holes in the darkness.

Enter. I have no enemies left any more,

0nly some friends who are late.

- Eugene Ruggles

[Larry Robinson]

The Cemetery Poem

Michelle finds me long past midnight, shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig further.
And if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shocked recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could simply shovel
into the earth and dig another hole
beside me, straining to bear the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then maybe, if she could trust like that
she’d begin to see them — the war dead,
how they stand under lime trees and ash,
here among us, papyrus and stone in their hands.
There will be no dreaming for me.
Not tonight. I dig without stopping and tell her—
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.
Michelle stares out at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and the very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
she stays the shovel I hold, to say —
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

- Brian Turner

[Larry Robinson]

Cancer Prayer

Dear God
Please flood her nerves with sedatives
and keep her strong enough to crack a smile
so disbelieving friends and relatives
can temporarily sustain denial.
Please smite that intern in oncology
who craves approval from department heads.
Please ease her urge to vomit, let there be
kind but flirtatious men in nearby beds.
Given her hair, consider amnesty
for sins of vanity; make mirrors vanish.
Surround her with forgiving family
and nurses not too numb to cry. Please banish
trite consolations; take her in one swift
and gentle motion as your final gift.

- Michael Astriee

[Larry Robinson]

Was it Writ?

Was it writ that first
She set her winds to whistle
spiraling round, bringing all weathers;
second, through mist, fog and fern
sortied the soft whistling owl;
third, shepherd intoned to his sharp-eared friend
fetching the lost from bog and fen;
fourth, thundered our jets;
fifth, deafening silence?
Sixth, ructions and ripples convulse!

Or might we
funnel absolute energies,
swiveling like a deer's ears
towards the source of sounds?

Furies calm;
quakes subside;
walls of hate crack.
We laugh at our pettiness.
A never-before-dance
begins to spin.

- Raphael Block

[Larry Robinson]

More Blues and the Abstract Truth

I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.

In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.

Then there’s the frequent bleeding,
the tender nipples, and the rot
under the floormat. If I’m not seeing
a cold-eyed doctor it is
another gouging mechanic.
Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs
and Eileen Briscoe’s elms
the house keeps cool.

Well. Then. You say Grandmother
let me just ask you this:
How does a body rise up again and rinse
her mouth from the tap. And how
does a body put in a plum tree
or lie again on top of another body
or string a trellis. Or go on drying
the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile.
Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes,
how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
With the wine. And the loaf.
And the excellent glass
of the body. And she says,
Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling.
My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

- C. D. Wright

[Larry Robinson]

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

- Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) spent much of his short, adult life as a volunteer soldier for the British military during World War I. He wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare. Owen was killed by machinegun fire just days before the end of the war.

[Larry Robinson]

THE PRISONER
(In Memory of My Father's Fallen B-29 Crew)

I am the age his mother was
when the telegram came.
I open the crumbling envelope
and find it there.
I am her again as I
read those bold
black words:
"So sorry,
the plane was lost,
shot down over Manchuria.
Your son is missing,
and presumed dead.
Many regrets."

I see him before me
as he left for the war,
handsome and young -
a farm boy
full of his bravery
yet hay-field green.
They all looked like that -
happy and cock-sure
in brown leather jackets
hats off to the side
fighting for the greatest country on earth
fighting for freedom.
But the ones who
will never come home
are already marked.

For fifty years my father
has tried to understand
why he was blown from the plane,
why his life was saved
and others perished.

It is 4 a.m. - I tell my father
to turn off his radio,
but the war wounds are
playing an all-night chess game
on his exiled body,
advancing across him
like the bombers that day
over Manchuria.

And he is listening
for news of his safety,
for Russians coming to
liberate Mukden prisoners of war,
for his release.

He is listening,
just as his mother did
every night for nine months
after the telegram came.


- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

[Larry Robinson]

Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem

As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying,
This is what I wanted.

- James Wright

[Larry Robinson]

It Was Like This: You Were Happy


It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

The Future

For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Invitation to the Dance

In the story my father tells
he's running up the marble staircase
at the Boston Music Hall, a young man
late for the concert-
decked out in his coat
and best tie, though earlier today
he's been to the burlesque house,
then counted his change for a doughnut,

saving just enough for the symphony,
the train-fare home.
How tall he is, and slim, his face
the same thin face I wore at 17
and his hair is nearly black,
flying up from his forehead
as he takes the stairs, two, three at once;

and if I could hold him fast at any moment
this would be it-not the thrill of first sex
not the complex joy of marriage,
not the morning of my birth-but as he is
here, now-quick enough to catch the melody,
late enough to move with it, keep time with it,
running with all his life before him
and the world filled with music.

- Martha Carlson-Bradley

[Larry Robinson]

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Labyrinth

I walk the beach
washed in churning sound,
sighting flight soarings,
cormorants, pelicans, gulls
on uplifting currents
shifting in the shore wind,
earful, eyeful coastal motion
and then I find along the sloping shore
a fully realized laid-out labyrinth
not a random residue of tidal flow
but measured paths formed of seaweed, sand, and stone
a shape satisfying the human eye, the foot,
for a circumnambulation of will
mind and questing spirit
of each traveler making the way alone.

Someone has left to a beach wanderer
this circular route map on the longer journey,
a place of time and space to ask directions
where each questing step leads to the center,
each inward step returns outward from the core,
a kind of breathing in and breathing out
endings requiring beginnings, living dying
and dying living on this ever changing shore.

I place my foot onto the winding path
asking what I need to ask myself,
what I hope for and what I fear,
what there is to gain and what to lose,
not that I will die but how
I'll take death's indignities,
accepting dying as but another stage,
how to give up the power to choose.

And at the labyrinthian core,
enlightened, relieved of choice
traveling where my footsteps take me
I turn to marvel where I've been,
how far I've come by walking,
and by the weavings of my mind and hand.
My questing over, I now may yield
to this winding destiny
footprinted on these pathways
soon to be erased in sand.

- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

Sunday, Salaam

Gushing forth
from three miles deep
in the Gulf Coast,
clouds roil beneath
the sunrise sheen,
slick acres
of greed.

No one is in
the pews
this Sunday:
the morning is
deadly,
silent

sea birds squat
bewildered,
the shore marsh
dragged, clogged
with the offal
of sacrifice
to strange gods,

the temple bereft,
mud and sandy traces
lie on its ancient, sacred floors,
walls echoing cries
of betrayed souls,
their Mother’s

nascent
thunder.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

A Ripe Fig

Now that you live in my chest,
anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.

Those other things that entice people,
like porcelain dolls from China,
which have made people weep for centuries,
even those are changing now.

What used to be pain is now a lovely bench
where we sit under the roses.

A left hand has become a right.
a black wall, a window,
a cushion in a heel of a shoe,
a leader of an assembly.

Intelligence and silence.
What we say is poison to some,
nourishing to others.

What we say is a ripe fig,*
but not all birds that fly eat figs.

- Jellaludin Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

Casualties

Having flown their last miles,
tattered wings flutter, try to rise
from the red-brown skin of a Louisiana beach.
Off the endangered list for one short year,
now just flotsam and jetsam lapping this humid shore.
An open vein, oil and water mix,
unspooling a knotted thread along the coast
to weave this pelican’s shroud.

The hasp of Pandora’s box, so carelessly sprung,
sinks to the ocean floor, eludes us in the current.
For now, an eternity of stars returns each night,
bright reminder that we lost paradise somewhere along the way.

- Susan Collier Lamont

[Larry Robinson]

Sit Quietly

If you have time to chatter,
Read books
If you have time to read,
Walk into the mountain, desert, and ocean
If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance
If* you have time to dance,
Sit quiety, you Happy Lucky Idiot.
*
- Nanao Sakaki
*

[Larry Robinson]

Another Long Walk


Given enough time,
there is always another long walk,
another proof of civilization's lie,
and all must prepare to run,
for no matter where you are born,
the sky can crack and drown you in fire.

The prophet said it would be fire
licking at our heels next time
and it is anyone’s bad luck to be born
where death comes cloaked as a walk
that goes on and on, until lives run
out of breath, stumble, and lie

in barren fields with nothing to lie
between them and scorching fire.
There is nothing to do, but to run
as fast as you can, to outdistance time
and this nightmare of a walk
where death is borne

on wings of silver and hope dies, unborn,
among hobbled prints that lie
in mute witness to another long walk
that crushes hearts into red grit of fire
and strangles cries of rage that time
after time, someone must pack up a life and run

to nowhere. This walk, too, shall run
its course, new stars will be born
to light up the heavens and, in time,
history will write, not quite truth, not quite lies,
of who and why and how all became fire.
Some will say there never was a walk

of death, that all people are free to walk
a thousand miles of blackened earth, to run
a marathon of fear, while fire
power presides as midwife to newborn
cries of war. Dark clouds gather and lie
low over fallow fields, where time

has run out. On distant horizon, fire is born,
from smoldering ash left to lie untended.
The time has come for another long walk.

- Patrice Warrender

[Larry Robinson]

Homing Song: Two Stanzas

Because any place
you affix as home is an astonishment
Destiny or destination-- you are home
and you know instinctly how to doubt it
a talent for searching, you begin
with maps and roots and tributaries
in a backyard or in a city park
unearthing cedar systems or star charts
or at your father's cabin
mapping the riverlogic of the Nemakagan
while otters skim and pack the trail
for you, while sand coyotes pull in
midnight air, and sing a capella
all the lonely way back
to you
And you sing back, throwing out
round songs to anonymous canyons
and the fine criminal lives
you admire and while
Invoking nothing more than the
comfort of the faraway familiar,
echoes like whispers
the sound of a descending star
your own long distance
it's all the same
Once you were reminded
of the throatsingers in Canada
as a child cried behind you
Each enhanced private legends
you used to decipher alone,
tremeloes come back
signifying you, signifying them
at the same time, a song
means all of us.

- Denise Sweet

[Larry Robinson]

The Gardener of Eden

I am the old dreamer who never sleeps
I am timekeeper of the timeless dance
I preserve the long rhythms of the earth
and fertilize the rounds of desire

In my evergreen arboretum
I raise flowering hopes for the world
I plant seeds of perennial affection
and wait for their passionate bloom

Would you welcome that sight if you saw it?
Revalue the view you have lost?
Could you wake to the innocent morning
and follow the risks of your heart?

Every day I grow a dream in my garden
where the beds are laid out for love
When will you come to embrace it
and join in the joy of the dance?

- James Broughton

[Larry Robinson]

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

The Time

Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.

A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. - Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

- William Wordsworth

[Larry Robinson]

Because

Lately she's been falling in love everywhere--
at the market, in the pharmacy, always in the cafeteria
sliding her tray over the metal rails,
last week with the hands of the attendant at the gas station.
Sometimes it happens all day long.

Yesterday at the campus it was everything again--
The way the postmaster was whistling,
or how the frisbee players sing the quad.
The way some students stay after class, that usually gets her.
Cashiers, people who sing at stop lights--all fair game.
Cab drivers--forget it.

With ice cream scoopers, with their little paper hats,
it is often love at first sight,
and she will never forget how at the sandwich shop--
the young man working said anything to drink, miss?
to the 80-year-old woman in front of her,
then when it was her turn, said ma'am instead.

Later today, blessed by all this loving
she will make some tea and play a violin concerto
for her dog who is deaf.
She will play the music as loud as it will go
because she can,
and because somehow he'll hear it,
and he will stand on the porch
of the fine yellow house, glowing.

She will be all choked up
because the lawn chairs
have never been this white before,
and because, tired ears flapping
in a soft Autumn breeze,
the old dog will bark back his joy.

- Lisa Starr

[Larry Robinson]

I Tell You

[excerpt]
I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.

How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.

And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,

brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.

***

In class today a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke — one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband

to the treatment table while we
the unimpaired looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her

shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were

alone in their bed. I tell you—
his smile would have made you weep.

***

At twilight I visit my garden
where the peonies are about to burst.

Some days there will be more
flowers than the vase can hold.

- Susan Glassmeyer

[Larry Robinson]

Cormorants

When the door to the chapel of dusk is ajar the cormorants flock and fly west,
necks outstretched towards salvation; nuns en route to vespers.
The silhouettes of their habits cut across the shadowed sky.
They form a cluster, as from the cloister hurrying to Evensong,
Then thread themselves along a line too fine to see.

I can tell them like beads, a sunset rosary: Ave Maria, Stella Maris, ora pro avis.
Pray for your dark daughters, now and at the closing of each day.
May the oceans continue to feed them;
May the winds bear up the black flames of their wings,
And may the rocky islands lend them sanctuary, at their journey's end.


- Jane L. Mickelson

[Larry Robinson]

Atlas

Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can't
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.

- Kay Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

In The Coffin

“I am not saying, I am not saying”.

The Roshi had thought deeply between the first and second saying?

The question, “Alive or dead?”

Mother Nature, alive or dead?

My closed eyes, alive or dead.

The spirit of growing things, alive or dead?

It is ours to say.

Sit and cry and wait.

It is ours to say.

- Bruce Gibbs

[Larry Robinson]

Imagine

Imagine the time the particle you are
Returns where it came from.
The family darling comes home!
Wine without being contained in cups
Is handed around.
A red glint appears in a granite outcrop
And suddenly the whole cliff turns to
Ruby!

- Jelalludin Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

Call It Accident


Call it midnight thump and boom.
Gumbo lockdown.

Call up gush;
swirl and spread.

Forward moving call it stalled.
Call a party, crown petroleum queen.

On call the creeping,
race for land.

Call it caught

drifting

in a starless sea.

Long-billed or swell-bellied, sway in the bilge.
Call it quits—trolled, talked-down.

Roll call: Plover, Egret, Tern.
Shrimp estuaries and pelican rookeries. Songbirds

who “I used to come here from America.”
Call it marshes packed in sludge.


- Monique Wentzel

[Larry Robinson]

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders—
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.

- Spencer Reece

[Larry Robinson]

The Wings of Love

I will row my boat on Muckross Lake when the grey of the dove
Comes down at the end of the day; and a quiet like prayer
Grows soft in your eyes, and among your fluttering hair
The red of the sun is mixed with the red of your cheek.
I will row you, O boat of my heart! Till our mouths have forgotten to speak
In the silence of love, broken only by trout that spring
And are gone, like a fairy’s finger that casts a ring
With the luck of the world for the hand that can hold it fast.
I will rest my on my oars, my eyes on your eyes, till our thoughts have passed
From the lake and the sky and the rings of the jumping fish;
Till our ears are filled from the reeds with a sudden swish
And a sound like the beating of flails in the time of corn.
We shall hold our breath while a wonderful thing is born
From the songs that were chanted by bards in the days gone by;
For a wild white swan shall be leaving the lake for the sky,
With the curve of her neck stretched out in a silver spear.
Oh! When the creak of her wings shall have brought her near,
We shall hear again a swish, and a beating of flails,
And a creaking of oars, and a sound like wind in sails,
As the mate of her heart shall follow her into the air.
O wings of my soul! We shall think of Angus and Caer
And Etain and Midir, that were changed into wild white swans
To fly round the ring of the heavens, through the dusks and the dawns,
Unseen by all but true lovers, till judgment day
Because they had loved for love only. O love! I will say,
For a woman and man with eternity ringing them round
And the heavens above and below them, a poor thing it is to be bound
To four low walls that will spill like a pedlar’s pack,
And a quilt that will run into holes, and a churn that will dry and crack
Oh! better than these, a dream in the night, or our heart’s mute prayer
That O’Donaghue, the enchanted man, should pass between water and air
And say, I will change them each into a wild white swan,
Like the lovers Angus and Midir, and their beloved ones, Caer and Etain
Because they have loved for love only, and have searched through the shadows of things
For the Heart of all hearts, though the fire of love, and the wine of love, and the wings.

- James H. Cousins

[Larry Robinson]

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

[Larry Robinson]

A Letter to Ruth Stone

Now that you have caught sight
of the other side of darkness
the invisible side
so that you can tell
it is rising
first thing in the morning
and know it is there
all through the day

another sky
clear and unseen
has begun to loom
in your words
and another light is growing
out of their shadows
you can hear it

now you will be able
to envisage beyond
any words of mine
the color of these leaves
that you never saw
awake above the still valley
in the small hours
under the moon
three nights past the full

you know there was never
a name for that color

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

A Section of the Oconee Near Watkinsville

Before I get in,
the aluminum canoe floats flat on the shine
of water. Then I ruin its poise.
Middle of the first shoal through, I’m out,
stumbling through the ankle-breaking rocks.
Canoe free-floating downstream, without decision
or paddle. I lunge and bruise across the shallows
To get a forefinger in the rope eye on the stern.

June afternoon light. June afternoon water.

I know there’s a life being led in lightness,
out of my reach and discipline.
I keep trying to climb in its words,
and so unbalance us both.
The teacher’s example is everywhere open,
like a boat never tied up, no one in it,
that drifts day and night, metallic dragonfly
above the sunken log.

- Coleman Barks

[Larry Robinson]

Lanling Hermitage

Up high to a cloister of rock walls
I pushed aside clouds and climbed
a fine hike was what I hoped for
ignoring the dangers I reached my prize
but as light on the escarpment faded
and streams branched out like the lines in my hand
and the forests held nothing but loneliness
and the pinnacles disappeared into space
a man of the Way after reaching such heights
descended alone in the stillness of night
the mountain turned dark after sunset
a hundred springs echoed across the fall sky
my lamentable burdens reappeared intact
why can't I stay free of cares


- Wei Ying-wu
(translated from the Chinese by Red Pine)

[Larry Robinson]

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

Recycling Day


In my neighborhood we put out three rolling cans
brown for trash, green for compost ( raw veggies and yard clippings only)
and blue for paper, plastics number 1 & 2 and aluminum.

At San Francisco General Hospital the green bin takes all food
dead or alive, animal, vegetable or mineral.
the blue accepts every hard plastic except number 7 (which can go in green if its made of compostable corn).

But I want to live in that other county--
you know, the one that takes it all.

On Monday they’ve got a green bin for envy, jealousy and greed,
Tuesday’s grey for despair, desperation and the desire to die.
Wednesday is puce and smells nasty –
bitterness, resentment and grudges you’ve held onto forever go in that one,
even the worms don’t like it,
so its sent off to the microbrial sludge plant for rehabilitation.

Thursday they do lavender for lost loves, unfulfilled dreams and broken hearts.
These get recycled into sperm and ovum
for people who can’t make their own children.

Friday is pink with orange polka dots for all thoughts obssessive,
addictive and self deprecating
And Saturday’s a rainbow can that the homeless folk like to rifle through
for sorrow and grief they wrap around their shoulders for warmth.

On Sunday the collectors go out for beer and hot dogs and watch football games,
while all the people in town wake at dawn to dance in the streets.
Faces like the next blank page in your favorite journal,
they dance to the silent songs in their minds
to the soft, strong beats of their coherent, empty hearts.

- Monnie Reba Efross

[Larry Robinson]

To Those Born After Us


I. Truly, I live in a time of darkness!
The innocent word is foolish. A smooth brow
Suggests lack of sensitivity. Those who are laughing
Just haven’t heard the terrible news yet.

What kind of times are these,
When a conversation about trees is almost a crime,
Because so many misdeeds are left unspoken?
That person there – calmly crossing the street,
Is probably no longer available
To his friends who are in trouble.

It’s true: I’m still earning a living.
But that’s pure coincidence.
Nothing in what I do justifies my eating my fill.
By chance, I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost).

People say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad that you can.
But how can I eat and drink, when what I eat
Is taken from the mouths of the hungry, and the
Water I drink deprives one who is thirsty?
But still…I eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise.
In ancient books one can read what is wise:
To not participate in the conflicts of the world,
To be without fear, in the short time we have,
Also to get along without violence,
To requite evil with good,
To not satisfy one’s wishes, but to forget them –
These things are considered wise.
All of them are beyond me.
Truly I live in a time of darkness!

II. I came into the cities at a time of disorder,
A time of hunger.
I came among people at a time of uproar,
And I was outraged with them.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

I took food between battles,
And laid down to sleep among killers.
I was careless in love,
And regarded nature without patience.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.


In my time, all roads led to a swamp.
My language gave me away to the executioner.
I could do very little. But the rulers
Sat more securely without me – that was my hope.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

III. You, who are the ones who will rise up
From the flood in which we went down,
Remember,
When you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times from which you escaped.

We travelled, changing countries more often than shoes,
Through the wars between classes, in despair
Because we found injustice, but no outrage.

And yet we do know this:
Hatred, even of meanness,
Distorts the visage.
Anger, even at injustice,
Makes hoarse the voice. Alas,
Though we wanted to prepare the ground for kindness,
We didn’t know how to be kind ourselves.

But you, when the time comes,
When human beings can help one another,
Remember us
With forbearance.

- Bertolt Brecht

[Larry Robinson]

A Day Comes

A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying "I."

Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it also has a right.

What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self.

Which grin—it is their natural pose—
and say nothing.


- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Heat

When I was little, young men like my uncles would croon.
Walking on the street or doing chores, a baritone groan:

Blue Skies. The blue of the night meets the gold of the day.
Body and Soul, Ramona, Ballerina, Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.

I asked my mother, why did the uncles sing like that?
Her three-syllable answer puzzled me: They’re in heat.

I remember it today as the young guy driving his van
With sound system blasting stops at a light, windows down.

We want to sound hot and magnetic. Or warm and charming -
Even the folk singer singing a song about global warming.

Folk music? All music is folk music, said a great musician:
I never heard a horse sing. (But they do play percussion.)

The souls deepest in hell don’t burn, they’re frozen in ice.
You’re full of hot air is an insult. But hot breath can be nice.

Your mother, color, class, region all co-author your drama:
Culture. A jerk politician can make hay in Oklahoma

By saying he doesn’t believe in Darwin, or climate change.
Let’s take a kayak to Nyack. Or be more at home on the range.

Vote for you, sigh for you, die for you. Is this the counterfoil
To sweetest music? Entropy, energy. Dead life come back as oil

To enable movement, music, power and light, heat, racket.
Cigarette lipstick traces, you know how we do, an airplane ticket.

Cool or hot music, cold calculation or comfort. Ancestral voice
Of pride or need: keening meaning — will we die of all this?

- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Let's Not Waste Time

If the sea is infinite and has nets,
if its music comes from the wave,
if the dawn is red and the sunset green,
if the forest is lust and the moon a caress,
if the rose opens and perfumes the house,
if the girl laughs and perfumes life,
if love comes and kisses me and leaves me trembling,
What does it matter,
while in my neighborhood there's a table without legs,
a child with no shoes or a bookkeeper coughing,
a banquet of potato peels,
a concert of dogs,
an opera of scabs.....
We need to become worried enough to cure the seeds,
bandage the hearts and write the poem
that will infect everyone.
And create the sentence which will embrace the whole world,
poets must smash swords,
must invent more colors and write Paternosters.
Letting laughter stay in the mouths of the tunnel,
not tell what's intimate, but sing in a choir,
not sing to the moon, not sing to the bride,
not write poems with ten-line stanzas, not fabricate sonnets,
Because we know how, we must yell at the mighty,
shout what I'm saying, that there are enough who live
howling under tin roofs with only what they have on their backs,
and mothers who don't comb their children's hair every day,
and fathers who wake up early and don't go to the theatre.
To clothe the humble placing our poems on their shoulders,
it's right to sing to the one who has no song and help him.
To kill usurers and with a rare patience convince them without
disgust,
To thresh in the fields, go down into a mine,
to be a diver for a week, visiting nursing homes,
jails, ruins, play with tiny children,
dance in the leprosaria.

Poets, let's not waste time, let's work,
because very little blood is reaching the heart.

- Gloria Fuertes
(from Anthology and Poems of the Slum, 1954)

[Larry Robinson]

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Falcon Moon


From the glow of dawn a moon appeared
It swept from the sky—speared me with its eyes

With me in its talons, to the sky it soared--
Like a hawk which snatches a songbird by force

I glanced at myself--no me to be seen
The moon of mercy pared my body to a soul

Formless I flew, just seeing the moon--
The moon, and the world lit in its gleam

In the soul I traveled, with the moon as my beacon
Lay bare the secret of the time before time

Sky, and then sky, all merged with the moon
The raft that is me was drowned in the sea

Without the force of that Sunburst of Shams
Neither the moon nor the sea can be seen.

- Jelalludin Rumi
Ghazal 19
(Translation by Shantanu Phukan)




Falcon Moon

Dar Charkh-e sahargah yaki mah ayan shud

Vaz charkh bazer amad o bar ma nigran shud



Chun baz ke birbayad murghi ba-gahe said

Birbud mara an mah o bar charkh ravan shud



Dar khud chun nazar kardam, khud ra banadidam

Zeera ke dar an mah tanamaz lutf chun jan shud



Dar jan chun safar kardam juz mah nadidam

Ta sirr-e tajalliye azal jumle bayan shud



Na charkh-e falakjumle dar an mah firo shud

Kashtiyye vujudam hame dar bahr-e nihan shud



An bahr bazad mauj o khirad baz bar amad

V-avaz dar afgand, chunin gasht o chunan shud



An bahr kafi kard ba har pareh az an kaf

Naqshi zi falan amad o jismi zi fulan shud



Be daulate makhdumiye shams al haqi tabrez

Nai mah tavan didan, o nai bahr tavan shud

[Larry Robinson]

When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It's a Good Thing

I always find it strange though I shouldn't how creatures don't
care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you'd name.
Empathy's only a one-way street.

And that's all right, I've come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,
and penultimate ones as well.
It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to
call.

- Charles Wright

[Larry Robinson]

Something About Habit

Habit goes a long way
to explain us, but not
far enough. Take Mother.
Dying of leukemia, she wanted
to leave early for the doctor’s one morning
so that I could see a new restaurant.
“It’s a greenhouse and a restaurant!”
She didn’t know that at that point
she had five more days to live.

Restaurants, we know, are places
of pilgrimage for the middle class.
Mother wanted nothing more
than to keep living as she had.
Even when she could no longer eat
she kept going out with friends,
ordering, then staring at her food.
It wasn’t only habit, of course,
but the love of life itself.

Sometimes love can also bring us
to question a habit. Each morning
I receive an e-mail forecast
for the weather in two places: my home
and St. Louis, where Mother lived.

Home again after her funeral,
that e-mail looked strange one morning.
I kept thinking, “Why does it matter
what the weather is in St. Louis?”

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

The Hunters

(after the /xam Bushman)

To see where the animals hide
is what we wish.
For the stars to take our hearts,
our hungry hearts,
and give us star-plenty, star-fullness,
is what we wish.

Always the stars are calling out:
"Tsau! Tsau!"
They are cursing the springbok's eyes
for men to kill.
Sitting outside in the cool of night
my grandfather spoke,
he said the springbok's eyes are cursed
by the sound of stars.

I listen for it now on summer nights
the "tsau! tsau!" of stars.

My grandfather said to the Ant Egg Star
when she rose,
"Take away my heart and change it
for a star-heart,
so my hunger, my burning hunger
will be satisfied.
I want a star's belly which is always full
and star arms.
My arrows stray and the game gets away
but stars aim well."

He sat down, he was silent,
he sharpened his arrows.

- Harold Farmer

[Larry Robinson]

Housecleaning

I packed up my ambition and sent it to the Salvation Army,
hoping for a tax deduction

hoping its remnants might better serve some other lost soul.



I washed my ego carefully
and put it at the curb with the other recyclables,

hoping it would come back in a milder form

seven generations from now.

I dismantled my arrogance
and bubble wrapped it for shipping to far-off places
more in need of my aggressive idealism,

hoping its use would better balance justice in the world.


I turned my jacket of pride inside out
and found humility hiding in the lining.

My karma exhausted by this cleaning, I took a nap.

And awoke in the autumn afternoon light
to find the last of the golden summer lilies in bloom.

- Laura Freebairn-Smith

[Larry Robinson]

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft though the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opens,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-wing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

- Paul Laurence Dunbar (1899)